The Real Reason People Ignore Your Carefully Chosen Wedding Registry
Registering is one of the best parts about planning a wedding — it’s not just about getting good presents, it’s about making a home with your honey. But inevitably, you’re going to have friends and family who just flat-out ignore your wish list and buy you something you never asked for. Why do they do this? We now have a scientifically proven answer.
A paper to be published in the Journal of Marketing Research this fall finds that people who identify themselves as close friends of the person they’re buying a gift for are more likely than acquaintances and distant relatives to buy that person something not on the registry. It boils down to conflicting motives: These friends are either giving to make their friend happy, or they’re doing it to prove they’re really BFFs — to show off, basically. So, if you registered for a new set of really nice bedding, your friend or sister might decide that what you really want is an elaborate wall hanging that reminds her of that trip you took together after college.
“[These motives] come to be in conflict in the registry context because it’s hard to give a gift that says something important about your relationship when [the recipients have] chosen it themselves,” one of the paper’s authors, Morgan Ward, an assistant professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University, told Yahoo Style. These close givers want to say, “I am a good friend to you, but I am such a good friend that I understand your taste preferences, lifestyle, etc., better than you understand them yourself. I am able to predict what you’d want possibly better than you are.”
And a set of high-thread-count sheets can’t say that, no matter how much you may want them.
In one of the experiments, Ward and co-author Susan Broniarczyk of the University of Texas asked half of their subjects to select items they would hypothetically like to receive as birthday presents, and the other half was then asked to select items — either from the registry or from a broader list of products — to give to the recipients, who were identified as either close or distant friends. The close friends were much more likely to choose gifts that weren’t what their friends said they wanted. What’s more, the recipients reported being least satisfied with the (hypothetical) gifts that weren’t on their list.
Even when gift givers say their primary goal is to please their friends, their actions speak much louder. Ward and Broniarczyk proved this with another experiment in which the givers were told that their identity would be masked by a “Secret Santa”-type website. When they knew they’d receive no credit for the present — and therefore wouldn’t get to show what great and insightful friends they were — they chose gifts from the registry.
It was a bunch of unwanted wedding gifts that inspired Ward to study all this in the first place. Now that she’s done, she does wonder if there’s another factor she left out of her research, and this one could make renegade gift givers feel a little less guilty: long-term satisfaction with gifts.
“My sister is probably the closest person I have, and she got me and my husband a pottery owl, which as you can imagine was not on my registry,” Ward said. “I had this thought that in the short term, it wasn’t what I wanted, but in the long term it was actually quite meaningful. I haven’t done any research about the longitudinal implications.”
Still, her paper implies that gift givers really should think twice before selecting a “more personal” present. Or maybe there’s a compromise. Buy a central gift from the registry and then personalize it with another, smaller gift, or a special note. Ward said the ideal registry setup would be “if there’s ways that retailers can let people personalize and signal a relationship without having to sacrifice buying off the registry.”
As for brides and grooms registering for gifts, getting what you want may be trickier.
“We live in a culture where you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Ward said. “You’re not supposed to ask, or look at [gifts] critically. Anything you get, you should be appreciative of. So it would be weird to be like, ‘Hey, seriously, can you buy off the registry?’ I might put some more thought into buying things that people would think match my habits or preferences, so they could feel like they were buying something that was really for me.”
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